Intergenerational World Cafe: Sharing our Gifts/Priviledges for Social Change

This is from Shilpa Jain from YES! who was a co-host with the World Cafe. See her lovely story here...

Juanita and I, along with Mariah from the World Cafe community and Austin from YES!www.yesworld.org, had a wonderful daylong inter-generational dialogue on May 2. It was on the theme of "Sharing Our Gifts and Privileges for Social Change" and we had a delightful cafe in the morning where we explored four questions:

1) Think of 1-2 experiences in your life where you first became aware of a gift or privilege you had (first everyone drew a bit on the table, and then they shared those experiences with their table); 2) How are those gifts and privileges manifesting in your life today? -- We had a beautiful harvest of the gifts and privileges in the room after this -- 3) Where do you feel blocked or challenged in your gifts and privileges? (silent time for free-writing first) and 4) If you could have any support to unleash those blocked spaces, what would it be? (sharing with a partner, then harvesting with the whole group).

It was rich and super powerful to see what all was present in the room. And to notice how similar strengths and challenges lived among each of the generations.

The use of the arts really deepened the Cafe experience as well as the rest of the day...journaling, music, improvisation, all helped to deepen the conversation.

It was a very special day for all of us and we looking forward to playing together again!

In fact, what was great was the ability to have an inter-gen day where people didn't feel overly-identified or boxed by their ages, and were instead able to listen, share, speak, receive, play, etc. together as a community.